The surprise visit by United States
President Barack Obama to Kabul on Tuesday just
ahead of the formal launch of his re-election bid
in the November presidential elections is a
politically symbolic act. He has estimated that
his visit to Kabul will resonate in the American
opinion. There is no triumphalism in his demeanor,
but the resolve to stay put in Afghanistan for at
least another a decade is difficult to overlook.
This resolve also has the stamp of an
obligation that he needs to see through his second
term in office as president if he gets re-elected.
Obama is determined to fulfill his obligation.
With the 10-year strategic partnership agreement
neatly wrapped up and a good beginning made to
reset ties with Pakistan - following his breaking
the ice, so to speak, with Pakistani Prime
Minister Yousuf Gilani on the sidelines of the
Nuclear Summit in Seoul - Obama estimates that
things can only get better on the political
and diplomatic front and
for him, the military front is not what counts
anyway.
The fact remains that apart from
an occasional whimper in Moscow, there has been no
resistance to the US-Afghan strategic pact in the
region as a whole. One important regional power,
India, is in fact an ardent votary of it. (The
Afghan foreign minister just visited New Delhi.)
But the clincher is that contrary to the general
impression (which is more a wishful thinking by
detractors), the US-Pakistan relationship is on
the mend. To appreciate that, one needs to look
back at the crucial discussions last week between
the US and Pakistani sides.
The
long-awaited resumption of high-level talks in
Islamabad to break the deadlock in the relations
between the United States and Pakistan ended in an
air of strategic ambiguity. Most observers have
rushed to judgment that the talks ended in
failure.
Prima facie, the talks indeed
seemed to end inconclusively. After all, transit
routes to Afghanistan via Pakistan still haven't
been reopened. And drone attacks on the North
Waziristan tribal area on the border with
Afghanistan also continue. The curious twist to
the tale is that last week's talks broke down
because the US resiled from an assurance given to
the Pakistani side that it would render an apology
for the American strikes last November that killed
24 Pakistani soldiers on the Afghan border.
But why wouldn't Obama sanction an
apology? It seems it doesn't look good in a
crucial election year for Obama to be seen
apologizing at the rate at which he is doing -
whenever the US soldiers burn Korans or urinate on
Afghan corpses or simply go berserk killing
civilians.
On
the other hand, what is there
in an apology? The stakes are very high for Obama
to settle with Pakistan. A summit meeting of
the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) will
be held in Chicago shortly and Obama has to
show something by way of light at the end of the
tunnel in the Afghan war. The US's European allies
are getting increasingly restive and Washington
needs to raise the money (estimated at US$4
billion annually) to fund the Afghan army in the
post-2014 scenario.
Above all, the US and
NATO urgently seek the reopening of the transit
routes through Pakistan to support troops
currently in Afghanistan and also to help withdraw
tens of thousands of weapons and materiel out as a
major drawdown approaches in 2014.
To be
sure, the backdrop is not of a kind that Obama
would quibble over an apology and deliberately
slow down the negotiation with Pakistan. That is,
unless he has a game plan. And his surprise visit
to Kabul Tuesday is a most telling evidence that
he does have a game plan.
According to the
US State Department spokesperson, "This
[US-Pakistan talks] is the beginning of the
re-engagement conversation. We're going to have to
work through these issues, and it's going to take
some time." The so-called "issues" are mainly
four:
Pakistan's demand that US should stop
the drone attacks and render an apology for the
November airstrike.
Transit routes via Pakistan.
Military aid payments.
The Taliban peace process.
What
emerges is that the US is working according to a
plan. When the US special envoy Marc Grossman
visited Pakistan last week, Washington had already
initialed the US-Afghan "strategic partnership
agreement" and prior to that, two memorandums of
understanding regarding the transfer of prisoners
to Afghan custody and the ending of night raids by
the US forces.
With the formal signing of
the strategic partnership agreement at Chicago,
the summit will endorse the strategy for the
transition, following which the US will move on to
the next stage of negotiations with Kabul over a
"status of forces agreement" concerning the
long-term US military presence in Afghanistan.
If there has been any doubt about the
American tenacity to stay on in Afghanistan, that
has been dispelled by Obama's visit to Kabul and
his public commitment that the US won't abandon
Afghanistan. This is a commitment that he is
obliged to carry through if he gets re-elected as
president.
It is increasingly apparent
that the US will maintain a sizeable military
presence in Afghanistan beyond 2014, including
combat troops and contingents of the US special
operations forces.
Such a
military presence requires back-up by American medical
evacuation personnel and helicopters, and also some
US war planes, especially aerial gun ships and
air-to-ground assault planes. These combat troops
cannot operate in a vacuum and, therefore, a fleet
of intelligence-gathering and surveillance
aircraft and their crews will also have to remain.
In sum, a substantial US military presence will
continue. The spin is that the US is determined
not to "abandon" Afghanistan, as it did in 1989
after the Soviet withdrawal.
However, the
sequencing of the negotiations with Kabul and
Islamabad (and the Taliban) becomes important. The
US would want the "status of forces agreement" to
be negotiated exclusively with Karzai,
sequestering it from the peace process with the
Taliban or the normalization of the US-Pakistan
ties.
So, what we may expect is that on a
parallel track the US will make haste slowly on
the peace talks with the Taliban even as the
"status of forces agreement" is worked out.
Washington has learnt a bitter lesson from the
Iraq experience, where the American occupation was
terminated by end-2011 despite desperate US
attempts to scuttle that. The US is not taking any
chances in Afghanistan.
Building
blocks The centerpiece of the US strategy
is the establishment of US military bases in
Afghanistan and everything else is built around it
- or integrated into it at various stages between
now and end-2014.
What we may expect,
therefore, is that despite the recent massive
attacks by the Taliban in Kabul, peace
negotiations will continue. The general impression
is that the Taliban devised a plan through these
attacks to win more attention, which could be
leveraged in its talks with the US.
But
the Taliban attacks may have instead helped
prepare the ground in Afghan opinion for the
continued military presence in Afghanistan beyond
2014.
Indeed, there has been no commotion
within Pakistan over the initialing of the
"strategic partnership agreement" (or among
regional powers), which is leading to the
establishment of US military bases. Karzai made
things double sure in a timely move that panders
to the Tajik sensitivities by also announcing that
the late Burhanuddin Rabbani's son - Salahuddin -
would be the new head of the Afghan High Peace
Council.
The missing link is
where Pakistan stands in the US's scheme of things.
The short and clear-cut answer is that Pakistan
still remains the kingpin in the entire US strategy
- despite all the unpleasantness that
manifested through the past year. Which is also
why Washington is still withholding the promised
aid to the Pakistani military estimated to be
anywhere between US$1.18 and $3 billion. Pakistan
needs the aid and China cannot substitute for the
US. (Nor is there any shred of evidence that
Beijing is interested in a zero-sum game with the
US.)
Without doubt, Grossman netted two
important gains in Islamabad. First, a "core
group" has been set up to help arrange a safe
passage for the Taliban who would travel for peace
talks held in Afghanistan, Pakistan or third
countries.
More important, Pakistan has
accepted Obama's invitation to attend the NATO
summit in Chicago. It can be said with one hundred
percent certainty that Prime Minister Yousuf
Gilani will be attending. The public pledge by the
Pakistani army chief Ashfaq Kiani on Monday that
the military will remain confined to its
"constitutional" role also carries an important
signal to Washington.
Meanwhile,
Washington has also resuscitated the New Silk Road
project, which is an important dimension to the
post-2014 scenario and whose realization is almost
entirely predicated on Pakistan's cooperation.
Evidently, Washington is taking Pakistan's
cooperation as a done thing. Geoffrey Pyatt, US
principal assistant secretary of state in the
Bureau of South and Central Asia, who was speaking
in Almaty during a regional tour of Central Asia
on April 20, said, "As proof of that [New Silk
Road] concept, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan and
Afghanistan have just formalized their own
Cross-Border Transport Agreement."
Pyatt listed
a number of activities that are giving traction
to the New Silk Road project: Afghan-Pakistan
trade and transit agreement, easing
of restrictions on India-Pakistan trade and commercial
ties; Uzbek and Turkmen supply of electricity
to Afghanistan; new rail connections being
built between Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan and Afghanistan;
a new rail line from the Uzbek border
to Mazar-i-Sharif; progress in the negotiations
over a Turkmenistan-Afghanistan-Pakistan-India gas
pipeline project; India's iron ore project in
Hajigak in Afghanistan; bids by American companies
in the upcoming six mining tenders in Afghanistan
(three in copper, two in gold and one in lithium);
creation of the Border Management Staff College in
Dushanbe and the Customs Training Facility in
Bishkek, and so on.
Pyatt linked the New
Silk Road to the Afghan settlement. "Along the New
Silk Road, all of Afghanistan's neighbors ...
stand to benefit from an end to the insurgency and
a broad-based political solution."
Suffice
to say, Obama's meeting with Gilani in Chicago,
which will be their second meeting in three
months, underscores the high importance the US
attaches to getting Pakistan on board the New Silk
Road project.
No matter the spin given to
Grossman's talks in Islamabad last week,
Washington is steadily working toward the
smoothening of the relationship with Pakistan so
that with Islamabad's cooperation, peace talks
with the Taliban can resume while on a parallel
track the US-Afghan status of forces agreement is
concluded. All these processes are expected to
converge by end-2014 and provide the underpinning
for the New Silk Road project.
The
building blocks of the New Silk Road project for
embedding Afghanistan in the Central Asian region
are already visible at the recently concluded
Regional Economic Cooperation in Afghanistan
(RECCA-V) in Dushanbe, which agreed on a
broad-based series of regulatory reforms,
cross-border economic initiatives, improved
customs measures, and inter-regional transit
agreements designed to promote regional economic
integration in Central Asia under US leadership.
Again, the Organization of Security
Cooperation Ministerial Conference of the Central
Asia Border Security Initiative held at Vienna on
April 17 (which was attended by Pyatt) has backed
the efforts at RECCA. The US made it clear at the
Vienna conference that the Organization for
Security and Cooperation in Europe will have a key
role in Afghanistan and Central Asia to accelerate
the New Silk Road project aiming at the
strengthening of economic integration between
South and Central Asia with Afghanistan as its
center.
Ambassador M K
Bhadrakumar was a career diplomat in the
Indian Foreign Service. His assignments included
the Soviet Union, South Korea, Sri Lanka, Germany,
Afghanistan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Kuwait and
Turkey.
(Copyright 2012 Asia Times
Online (Holdings) Ltd. All rights reserved. Please
contact us about sales, syndication and
republishing.)
Head
Office: Unit B, 16/F, Li Dong Building, No. 9 Li Yuen Street East,
Central, Hong Kong Thailand Bureau:
11/13 Petchkasem Road, Hua Hin, Prachuab Kirikhan, Thailand 77110
